


second from the left.

by outpastthemoat



Series: new testament [just more of the same 'verse] [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Amelia Richardson - Freeform, Fallen Castiel, Human Castiel, Jody Mills - Freeform, M/M, Mary Winchester - Freeform, Photographs, Photography, Pictures, Post-Series, Sam Winchester - Freeform, Singer Salvage Yard, Slow Burn, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-19
Updated: 2013-02-19
Packaged: 2017-11-29 20:56:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/691351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam sends him a card.</p>
            </blockquote>





	second from the left.

 

  
_Memories of you_   
_That I just don't have right now_   
_I'll make them up_   
_One cup of wanting you_   
_Two cups of hoping somehow_   
_These things come true_   
_While I'm staring at pictures of you_   


Sam sends him a card.

"What the hell is this?" Dean demands, and from over the line comes Sam's weary sigh. 

"It's a card, Dean," Sam says, slow, and Dean can tell he's thinking,  _my genius brother, ladies and gentlemen_.

"And what the hell is it doing in my mailbox?" Dean asks impatiently.  "You know I didn't mean it when I told you  _don't forget to write._ "

"Just open it," Sam explains, unnecessarily. 

"Is this for my birthday? What, you couldn't get a hold of a skin mag?" Dean asks.  "What the hell do I need a card for?"  He shakes the card out of its envelope, and a something smooth and shiny falls out; a photograph, of Sam's cheesy grin and Amelia's teasing smile and a prominent ring, all diamonds and antique gold.

"No offense, but I'd rather have a can of shaving cream," he tells Sam.  "What am I supposed to do with this, Sammy?"

"I've got to get back to work," Sam says, "and for chrissakes, Dean, it's just a photograph, Amelia wanted me to take an engagement picture with her.  I'm not asking you to place it in a gilded frame and hang it above the fireplace, just stick it on your fridge or something."

"Congratulations, I guess," says Dean, and Sam hangs up, and he leaves the photograph on the kitchen table in an act of minor rebellion.

"What's this?" asks Cas, later, standing in the door of the kitchen with Sam's card in his hands.

"An  _engagement_  picture," Dean says, disgruntled.

"What should we do with it?" Cas asks, frowning down at the photograph in his hand.

" _I_  don't know," Dean says.  "Sam wants us to hang it on the fridge."

Cas digs through the junk drawer and pulls out a roll of electrical tape, hands it to Dean wordlessly.  So Dean tears off a strip and sticks the photograph on the mottled surface of Bobby's ancient refrigerator, a lone decoration on the empty surface.

They stare at it together.  "It might look nicer," Cas ventures finally, "if you cleaned the fridge."

"Hmm," Dean says, and doesn't. 

The photograph is still there the next day, in all its forlorn glory, and though the picture is too glossy and too slick, Sam does look nice with his hair neatly trimmed, wearing a sweater vest, and Amelia's not even looking at the photographer. Instead her head is turned, bent toward Sam's, and she looks up at him with soft eyes like he's some kind of miracle and damn it, it's kind of a really nice picture, and maybe Dean  _should_  frame it, have it hanging up on the wall the next time they visit.

But the photograph just looks so out of place on their fridge, surrounded by all that empty white space, and Dean catches himself thinking about that blank expanse at odd moments all through the following days.

"So Sam proposed?" Jody asks, catching sight of the photograph the next time she's over.

"Yeah, finally," Dean tells her, proud because he knows Sam did it right, went down on one knee with rose petals and champagne; his little brother took her father out for lunch and asked his blessing, found the right kind of ring and sent a picture to Dean's phone for his approval.

"That picture kind of outshines your fridge," Jody says teasingly.  "Hang up some more photos, why don't you?"

"Photos of what?" Dean asks her, rolling his and leaning against the countertop, crossing his arms.  "Me 'n Sam hunting vamps? Cleaning our guns?  Averting the apocalypse?  All those happy, carefree childhood memories?"  

"Huh," says Jody, unimpressed.  "You know what I mean, kid."

But that comment makes the gears in Dean's head whirl, and the next morning as Cas starts the coffee, he pulls out his wallet and takes out a small, worn photograph and tapes it next to Sam and Amelia, close enough for the edges of both photographs to overlap.  

Cas reaches out and touches the ragged picture, the morning light catching his fingers, shining through the sheer curtains above the kitchen window and casting a pattern of lace over Mary's blonde curls.

"That's nice," he says, and Dean looks at him standing there, with sun in his hair as he looks on at Dean's family in photographs on their fridge in curious silence.  "They're all together."

Mixed up, that's how Dean feels the next few days, mixed up because whenever he looks at the refrigerator he doesn't know if he's feeling sad or happy, if he's smiling to see Sam's arm around Amelia's shoulders or swallowing with an ache in his throat to see Mary's lost smile.  

He wonders what the fridge would look like with John's face, or Bobby's, or even his own, and he feels uneasy in his skin, an old wound scratched raw again, bleeding to the surface.  

There’s a box under Dean’s bed that he hasn't opened for weeks now, and its existence hangs heavy on his mind.  He's been walking around the house with the weight of that secret pulling him down, and although he hates to admit it it’s becoming a strain. 

He’s not sure why he hasn’t told Cas about it.  He’s even started to, once or twice, gotten as far as opening his mouth and that’s when everything seems to fall apart as usual.  But Dean’s getting desperate, and this isn’t something he wants to talk to Sam about, and while Cas might not be human, he’s getting there, sure and certain, slow and steady, and Dean wonders if maybe Cas will understand about this.

He finally goes looking for Cas, finds him in the garage.  Dean hovers by the Nova, watching with fascination as the laces on Cas’s boots, which are at present the only part of Cas he can see, slowly work themselves loose and come untied.  

“What is it, Dean?” Cas’s voice asks, coming from somewhere underneath the Nova, and Dean’s brain short-circuits.

“Oh, nothing,” Dean says disingenuously, all practiced nonchalance, and from under the Nova comes a deep sigh.

"Either tell me what’s bothering you, or move.  You’re blocking the light.”

"There’s this thing,” Dean begins slowly.

“Do we need to kill it?” Cas asks, muffled somewhat by the ominous sound of something metal hitting the ground.

"It's not that kind of thing,” Dean tells him. “It’s this box.”

Scuffled noises come from underneath the Nova.  “And what’s the box done?” Cas asks patiently.  

“Made me think,” Dean says.

“Sounds like a fairly dangerous object,” Cas says, and Dean can hear the amusement in his voice.  “Is it cursed?”

"It might be," he answers cautiously.  "Feels like it."  He stands very still and tries to think of the right words to describe what it is that’s bothering him so much about the box.

"Haunted, then?"

Dean grimaces. "Definitely."

Cas slides halfway out from under the Nova, and Dean can’t help but stare a bit, because Cas has motor oil on his cheek and Dean’s fingers twitch with the helpless urge itch to wipe it off.

Cas squints up at him.  “Where is it?” 

"Come on," Dean tells him, "I'll show you."  And Cas scrambles out from underneath the car, wincing when he puts weight on his right leg; he still favors that leg slightly, and though it's not too noticeable Dean can see it, in the days after a hunt, how Cas moves slower.

In Dean's room, Cas perches on his bed without a thought for his oil-stained jeans and grimy boots, but Dean doesn’t tell him to get off; the sheet’ll be washed, eventually, and neither he nor Cas cares about stains.  

Instead he pulls that damned box from under the bed, wishing heartily he’d never brought it up from the basement in the first place, because it looks like they’re going to have a  _moment_ , and Dean doesn’t think he’s ready for another one so soon after the last one.  

He puts the box on his bed and sits down, across from Cas.  Cas opens the box and goes through it carefully, nodding slightly as he pulls out Bobby’s wallet and keys, frowning when he pulls out the two silver rings, examining them carefully in the palm of his hand; but those things aren’t really the problem here, it’s what’s underneath that has Dean’s heart hammering so loud he surprised Cas can’t hear it.  

Cas pulls a handful of photographs out of the box and spreads them carefully on the bed. He looks at each one, and Dean can’t help but watch his face, because of the way puzzlement and curiosity and even a strange sort of longing shift across his face.  

“I see,” Cas says finally, and maybe he really does.  “These pictures make you sad.”

And Dean has to swallow hard, has to clench a muscle in his cheek down hard.  “Yeah, Cas,” he says.  “That’s it.”

Because there are pictures here that make Dean want to fucking weep, that’s the problem, pictures that make him want to go somewhere very dark and quiet and wrap his hands around his head and scream until he’s hoarse.

There isn’t really any order to the photographs.  At the top of the stack, there’s a few pictures of a much-younger Bobby, with the pretty, slim woman Dean knows is Karen. Wedding photos, taken right-the-fuck-here at Bobby’s house, back before it was a salvage yard, back when flowers lined the driveway and the trim was painted a crisp white. Then there are other pictures, one of Karen in a long cotton dress, another of Bobby, only without that familiar gruff expression, smiling with blinding happiness at whoever was holding the camera.  

And underneath those, there are other photographs, ones Dean doesn’t recognize but oh, they’re him, him and Sam, and even him and Sam and John.  Dean and Sam at ages six and two, sitting at Bobby’s kitchen table.  Dean and Sam at ages twelve and eight, in the back of Bobby’s pickup.  Dean and Sam at ages seventeen and thirteen, down by the river with their shotguns, having target practice.  Photographs Bobby must've taken ages ago, photographs he must have kept in the basement for years, along with Sam's football and Dean's mitts.

And there’s even that one awful photo taken only a few years ago, with Ellen’s serious eyes and Jo’s faint smile, Bobby’s almost bowed head. Sam, looming over them all, and there, on the left, there's Cas, by his side.  Dean hadn’t even known there was another copy, thought the last time he’d ever see Ellen and Jo’s living faces was the moment before this very picture burned to ash in the fireplace downstairs.  

And Dean’s used to the familiar ache that Ellen and Jo’s faces bring, but it’s something far different and stranger that he feels about seeing that old familiar trenchcoat and Cas’s serious face, and Dean remembers another photograph, black and white, with Cas in ripped jeans and an army jacket, holding a gun.

"Remembering hurts you," Cas says slowly, looking up at Dean then, "but, Dean, I imagine it would be far worse to forget."

And Dean shouldn't want to cry, though he does, and instead he taps the corner of one photograph on the top of Cas's head.  "I think you're right, buddy," he tells Cas.  "Help me hang them up?"

And yeah, it  _does_ hurt, every time Dean glances at the fridge and sees the collage of photographs spread across its surface, criss-crossed with black lines of electrical tape, and it hurts when one picture or another jumps out at him, or when a long-dead face catches his eye.

Jody's fridge is clean, blank, but the walls in her kitchen are covered with framed photographs, snapshots of a family, a man and a woman and a boy.

"How do you stand it?" Dean asks her, looking at a carefully dusted picture of a young mother holding her newborn son.  "How do you stand to look at them every day?"

Jody smiles at him, patient, and if only Dean could handle his grief and loss as gracefully as she has, if only he could bear his tragedies with her endurance, he thinks he would a far better man.  

"Yeah, it hurts," Jody tells him, and she pulls out her camera and flicks through the images, stopping at a photograph, a recent one, a self-portrait of a solitary woman on a beach, shading her eyes with one hand and holding the camera with the other.  

"But I take new ones," she says, and she fires off a quick shot, capturing Dean's look of startled surprise.  

He finds Cas in the kitchen, standing in front of the fridge when he goes home.  He's smiling at a photograph of Dean, age nine, sitting on top of the Impala's roof.

And slowly it begins to dawn on Dean exactly what’s wrong with the fridge, why it bothers him so badly: he’s got pictures of his mother, his father, of Sam and Bobby and even himself, from infanthood through age thirty-three - but not a single picture of Cas, not  _this_  one, at least, not the Cas he eats breakfast with every morning, not the one he taught to wear bathrobes and make coffee and play catch.

Cas could vanish tomorrow and even though Dean knows his face by heart, it wouldn’t be enough, and Dean’s reminded of all the times when Cas had gone missing, when his face started to slip away from him until Dean couldn’t hold down a proper visual anymore: how Dean could remember the shape of his eyes or the way his lips were perpetually chapped, but he couldn’t remember Cas’s face as a whole, couldn’t remember the way Cas’s smiles start in his eyes and build up slowly until all at once they finally reach his lips, causing tiny crinkles to form around the corners of his eyes.

And Jody's right, of course; of course he needs pictures, needs to preserve his memories of this past year with Cas.

Because Dean doesn’t want to forget what Cas looks like when he smiles, doesn’t want to forget what Cas looks like when he’s annoyed, or when he’s full of quiet contentment, or when he’s covered in motor oil from head to toe, or when he’s eating sunflower seeds as they stake out a vamp nest, so carefully making sure not to mess up Dean’s car.

He doesn’t want to forget the way Cas peers over the rims of his sunglasses when he wants to catch Dean’s eye, or the way the laces on his boots slowly begin to disentangle from the moment he ties the knot, or the way his left knee always wears out a hole in his jeans before the right one, even the way he’ll sometimes stick out his tongue in single-minded concentration when he’s working on the Nova.

Cas has a life, and that’s a thought that’s still a startling thought to consider, but it’s something Cas had wanted, this life with Dean, and so Dean wants to document it in every way possible: sear each image into his mind’s eye, fix each moment firmly in place in his memory, hang each memento of their time together with electric tape on the front of the fridge with all the rest of Dean's family.

He wants to mark the progression of events, something to look back on later just to be able to see, in stark relief, what’s changed over the years: if Cas’s smiles will grow wider, easier, more frequent, or if he’ll still look at Dean exactly the same way he does now in ten years’ time, or if, when they take pictures together, he and Cas will migrate even closer until their wrinkled cheeks are pressed together.

He wonders if he’ll ever have a picture of Cas kissing him, his face turned to meet Dean’s, the way lovers do.

There’s so many moments he’s already missed capturing, like the first time Cas tried coffee and hated it, or the way the Nova looked before Cas rebuilt it.  And Dean knows Cas feels like he’s missing something, a purpose maybe, and maybe Dean should feel like he’s missing something too, since for once there isn’t the weight of the world on his shoulders.  But really it doesn't feel that way at all, because he’s got a mission already; somewhere along the way his mission changed from  _save Sammy_   to _save the world_   to  _build a life with Cas._

"We need one of you up there, too," he says, and Cas looks at him oddly.

"Me?" he asks, and Dean wonders if he's imagining the way Cas leans in towards him, moving close by Dean's side.

"Yeah," Dean tells him, and because Cas is close, so close he can feel their wrists brush against each other, he reaches out and rests his arm around Cas's shoulders.  "You belong there, too."

Stalking Cas with the camera becomes Dean’s favorite hobby.

Cas hates it, takes to slipping out of the room whenever he spies the camera in Dean’s hand, ducking away whenever Dean looks through the lenses, or sneaking out the back door when he hears the camera click on, and so Dean ends up with twenty-two photographs of the back of Cas’s head before he gets annoyed and corners Cas in the salvage yard.

"Whoa there, buddy," he says, grabbing Cas by the sleeve, holding him still, trying to frame Cas's face between rows of junkers.

“I’m taking your picture, and that’s final, so deal," he adds, and that earns him a prime example of Cas’s smiting gaze, capturing his slight squint as he looks straight into the sun with no apparent ill-effects.

"You’re a menace,” Cas says darkly.

Dean captures Cas's look of exasperated fondness when he corners Cas washing the dishes, and one of Cas at the breakfast table, eyes at half-mast and holding a half-empty cup of coffee, robe unbelted and dark hair standing straight up, and those pictures go right up on the fridge with all the others.

But it’s hard, still, to get a picture of Cas smiling, though heaven knows Dean’s tried. He just wants a picture like the one of Bobby, taken by Karen, or Amelia and Sam; he just wants a picture of the way Cas looks at him the way he does, still, every day.

And then, finally, one evening after dinner he finds Cas on the porch, sitting on the old swing that had somehow survived the fire, swinging slightly with one steel-toed boot pushing against the porch railing, looking out past the lines of junkers and down towards the river where the sun is disappearing over the horizon.

"There room for me?" Dean asks him, and Cas shuffles over, making space for Dean by his side.

"Take a picture of that," Cas says, and nods toward the sunset. 

"That's nice view, Cas," Dean tells him, "but it'd be a lot better with you in it," he says, and when Dean takes the picture he catches Cas's eye through the lens, and captures the way Cas looks just before his slow smile breaks across his face.

And that picture goes on the fridge too, second from the left in a row of photographs, right alongside Mary and Sam and Amelia, and that's where Cas finds it the next morning.  Cas brushes a finger carefully over the figure in the photograph, dark hair framed by the glow of the sun.  

“That’s me,” he says, but it’s a question.

“Yeah,” Dean tells him, “yeah, Cas. That’s you.”

Cas doesn't say anything else, just stares at the picture for a while longer, and Dean wonders what he's thinking.  

It’s a good picture, Dean thinks with a hint of pride, but it’s got nothing to do with the photography and more to do with the way Cas is looking at the photographer.  

"You’ve got the nicest smile I’ve ever seen," he says to Cas.  

Four smiles, in the middle of the fridge: Mary, wistful; Sam, exuberant; Amelia, adoring.  And then there’s Cas, all lit up from within.  “You look happy,” Dean says.  

“Well,” Cas says slowly, and there’s that same smile, all over again.  “That’s because I am.”


End file.
